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While the British Navy still seemed to rule the seas, Darlan favored the British. He had been Chief of the Naval General Staff since 1936, and at the beginning of the war he was indeed so floridly Anglophile that Vice Admiral Emile Muselier (now an ardent De Gaullist) cabled him: "You are renouncing the whole of the French naval policy dating back to the 18th Century and abandoning the sovereign rights of France." In 1939 fluently English-speaking Admiral Darlan reviewed the British Reserve Fleet at Portland with King George. After Dunkirk, King George gave Darlan a special decoration for the evacuation, although Darlan had not been there. But after the Armistice, when he became Vichy's Minister of Marine, Darlan's viewpoint on the British underwent a change.
It has become axiomatic that most French naval officers have abhorred the British ever since they attacked the French Fleet at Oran, not so much because the French were shot down like sitting ducks, but because the British action showed so little faith in the honor of the French naval tradition. It is also axiomatic that the opinion of the French Navy's seamen is so doubtful that they might mutiny against any orders to fight Britain. At any rate, the Admiral of the French Fleet today loathes the British. Of Dunkirk he has recently said: "That was glorious. I also remember Oran. That was shameful." Of the British blockade he has said: "Germans are more generous and more understanding of the needs of humanity than the English." And the Admiral still has a Navy to command. According to estimates:
By British action, or by defection to the Free French forces, France has lost nine battleships, four cruisers, 15 destroyers and four submarines.
France still has one battleship, 13 cruisers, some 20 destroyers and some 50 submarines.
Darlan's political intrigues have brought him few if any friends among France's naval aristocracy, which, by tradition at least, keeps its mind on warships. He has a wife, as retiring as the Admiral is not, and a son, Alain, who recently quit the Navy, where he had been a code officer, in favor of the insurance business. Social superiors of Darlan like to call attention to his French-bourgeois habit of wearing a wing collar, which has earned him the nickname of "The Tax Collector." But all this the Admiral can and does ignore. "I am a dur and have a tough skull," he has said.
He is Commander of France's only surviving, if heavily battered, military arm, and second in command of France. Marshal Pétain has made him not only Vice Premier but also Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Interior, the Navy, and Propaganda and Information—and by Constitutional Act he stands in succession to the Marshal himself. Under these titles and perquisites he is a neat French edition of the able, scheming, ruthless personality-type which has been a boon to Fascism wherever it has risen.
Last week Vichy put on sale throughout Unoccupied France 50,000 handsome portraits of Vice Premier Admiral Jean Francois Darlan—suitable for framing.